Roey Brecher is co-founder and CTO of pricing intelligence startup WisePricer.

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in an apartment that our business development guy is renting in Oakland. I’m practically homeless at the moment but I couldn’t care less.

If there’s anything the past year had taught me, is that owning less stuff keeps me happy. I (partly) own one big ‘thing’ that I’m most proud of, and that is WisePricer. The clothes I wear are either startup t-shirts (x3 @olark, so thanks @ben) or Uniqlo whites. I take next to nothing from the business account but I’m positive better days will come. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

We launched WisePricer in 3 months.

It was a dirty alpha version with core functionality missing, but we got a few paying customers right off the bat. There was (and is) a real need for what we came up with, even in its barely functional state. That proved to be the first lesson which is something most entrepreneurs know these days but as I came from the corporate world, I had no clue.

Moving forward and getting early traction while trying to raise seed money was another eye opener. It wasn’t before long that we realized that our product was suffering from the time we spent talking to investors. We did raise a small amount but made a mental note to focus on generating revenue. It worked.

Scaling efficiently was our next big challenge. We learned not to solve any problem before it was real and actually hurting us. You only begin to understand your true power to persevere when your server crashes 40 minutes before an important demo. If you can keep yourself from tending to tasks that are fun but you are not entirely sure will be fruitful (like developing that awesome feature your team considers really cool), pat yourself on the back, that’s how it’s done.

Spending money is another big thing. As we soon decided that we would try to minimize our dilution by growing slowly through earnings rather than investments, we started to take our cash flow seriously. We spent December’s holidays in a cheaper country (rent, food, booze and whatnot). We relied on some good friends and set up office in their conference room (they have kicked us out since, all on good terms).

I won’t tell you how three of us shared a two-bedroom apartment … but let’s just say my co founder knows my snoring pattern pretty damn well.

We were also hustling. When attending demo days or conferences, asking for discounted admission tickets is nothing to be ashamed of. Paying for a booth? Not in our budget. You will be amazed how many people you can meet when you are actually waiting around a conference hall premises and engaging in conversations.

There’s another truth I learned: Always ask for discounts. And if you are getting something for free, ask for an extension (Yuval from our team will say, ask for two). In one five minute phone call my cofounder saved us $12,000 in hosting fees.

Are we making enough money to live long and prosper? We soon had to face that question when we wanted to bring more people on board. More people means more expenses, but our time was devoted to onboarding new customers. And the B2B world is different in that you need to have a solid sales funnel.

We went back to Israel only to realize we needed to be in Mountain View two weeks later for a YCombinator interview. That interview didn’t go as expected (unless you are expecting to not get picked which I can honestly say we didn’t). It did however gave us the push we needed to pivot into the enterprise world. Think big and you shall receive.

I learned some things about working while spending your spare time with your co-workers. In a normal world, you rarely see your co workers outside of work. Heck, you rarely think about work outside of work. In a startup world, you are spending so much time with your team you sometime want to drive a fork through their hearts and twist it, but you don’t, because that’s illegal, and you need them.

Jokes aside, it can be most stressful. Learning to push aside differences and keeping non-work issues where they belong (outside of work) is how you grow.

It all comes down to Ego. The more you have of it, the less you will be willing to compromise.

Winning a startup competitions is a great way for an entrepreneur to take an idea from concept to reality, to get attention, and to obtain initial funding, which can be one of the most difficult hurdles.

I’ve won two startup competitions and have learned some lessons along the way.

There are hundreds of startup competitions ranging from Arch Grants to MassChallenge, TechStars, Y-Combinator and Startup Chile. Here are three things you should consider when applying to a startup competition:

1. How you get the money you win
2. Location and the cost of living
3. The startup network

How you get the money you win

Most competitions ask for equity in a company. Arch Grants, MassChallenge and Start-Up Chile do not. They award equity free grants of $50,000, $100,000 or $40,000, respectively. However, the realities of how you actually get the money are quite different.

The most important difference is how the money makes it to your bank account. MassChallenge distributes money once your accelerator program ends. Arch Grants writes you a $20,000 check on your first day and then $10,000 checks each of the following three quarters. Start-Up Chile will “reimburse” up to $40,000 dollars over a six month period. This means every 4-6 weeks you meet with your account executive and justify the things you’ve spent money on, hoping they approve everything. They also actually only reimburse 90% of your expenses. If they don’t approve an item, too bad, you’ve already spent money on it. This can be an incredibly frustrating experience for everyone involved.

The goal of the grant is to help you create a growing business, not fill out paperwork.

When submitting to a foreign competition, another thing to note is currency conversion. While a competition may advertise they are awarding so much money in US dollars, they may actually award the money in non-U.S. currency. With fluctuations in currency rates, the award amount can end up being more or much less than you were expecting to win.

Location and the cost of living

The issue here really comes down to what kind of startup you are building. If there is a significant international component to your mission, being based abroad could be advantageous. However, for the majority of startups, being stateside is usually the best option. The USA is still far and away the best place to start a company. The USA has an infrastructure to support the growth of a small business and easy access to resources that may not be readily available in other countries.

The lower cost of living you may experience in a foreign city vs. a US city can be overshadowed by the cost of moving to a foreign country. Buying plane tickets and visas really adds up.

Another overlooked piece of the equation are the costs and frustrations that come with needing to buy things not offered in that country, like iPhones and iPads. When looking into a foreign country as a place of business, it is important to check to see what resources they have. Will you have easy access to purchasing computers and other technology needed to conduct business? Many of the things that Americans take for granted are not readily available in other countries.

The cost of living in various cities in the U.S. can also vary greatly. Most competitions require you to move to the host city, and it’s important to know what additional costs this may involve that could offset your funding award. Living in St. Louis, I can spend more money on my business and less on rent.

The startup network

Aside from money, connections and mentoring are the best benefits a startup competition can provide. You should consider who will be in the program with you (fellow startups) and the people the program executives can introduce to you. A contest like Start-Up Chile is BIG. They bring in roughly 100 companies, three times a year. This means you’re surrounded by roughly 700 entrepreneurs at any given time. You’re either going to feel lost in a sea of entrepreneurs, or uber connected to like-minded individuals from around the world. It’s what you make of it.

Other competitions like St. Louis-based Arch Grants are much smaller. For my round, they only accepted 15 companies (20 will be accepted in the next round). Because of this, it’s much easier to stand out. St. Louis is an amazing place that is going through a revival. They’re quite eager to pump you up. If you let them, everyone will want to help you in any way they can.

Overall, one competition may turn out to be the better deal for entrepreneurs. If you don’t mind giving up equity in your company, the network that TechStars and Y-Combinator provide could be worth it. If you’re a non-profit, your best bet is probably a bigger and broader competition like MassChallenge. For me, Arch Grants has come out the winner, primarily because the money is really a grant, and the city is affordable and has a dedicated support network.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to complain about free funding. However, researching the finer details of any program you apply to is essential. Sometimes clauses can be crippling.

Marshall Haas, 23, is the co-founder of Obsorb. His other works include 18th.me, Connected Bedding, and AllRendered. You can follow him on Twitter @MarshallHaas. Marshall and his co-founder are the only people to have been accepted into both Start-Up Chile and Arch Grants. Marshall started Obsorb when he was accepted into Start-Up Chile’s first round. Obsorb is currently in Arch Grants’ first round. Between the two programs, the company has been given a total of $90,000 in equity free grants, in addition to other funding.

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Online shopping is all about convenience. While developments in data analysis, marketing, and payment technology have improved the overall flow of e-commerce, delivery is still a frustrating obstacle at the end. If the recent shopping frenzy following Thanksgiving revealed anything, it’s the explosion of online commerce. There is a greater need for shipping options that don’t entail waiting at home or missing deliveries.

The BufferBox concept is refreshingly simple. BufferBox sets up green pick-up lockers that serve as shipping addresses. Consumers enter that address instead of their own, receive a PIN in the mail, and then can pick up the package at their convenience. It’s a bit like a privately owned, communal P.O. box.

“We want to remove as much friction as possible from the shopping experience, while helping consumers save time and money, and we think the BufferBox team has a lot of great ideas around how to do that,” a Google rep told VentureBeat via email today.

BufferBox is based in Waterloo, Ontario. The founding team came to the Bay Area over the summer to participate in Y Combinator where it was one of the more talked-about startups following the demo day. With this acquisition, employees will join Google’s Shopping team in Kitchener-Waterloo and continue business as usual.

Six months ago, Google changed its Shopping feature to “a purely commercial model” where top results are dictated by the highest bidder. Microsoft, in an attempt to undercut Google’s marketshare, launched a “Scroogled” campaign on Wednesday. While Google won’t comment on its Shopping roadmap (or the terms of the deal), BufferBox will obviously benefit from Google’s massive resources and use them to move faster and its scale.

In a word, sexy.

A Y Combinator startup, DoubleRobotics’ debut product is Double: basically a cylinder and a stick. Just like a Segway, Double balances on its wheels. Unlike a Segway, however, an iPad rides Double, not you. You control it from your own iPad … wherever you happen to be, you see what it sees, and anyone who sees Double, sees you.

Take a look:

The robot, if you can call it that, is only 15 pounds. It adjusts height so you can communicate naturally at either standing or sitting height, and moves forward, backward, and turns as you control it from your own iPad or iPhone at a remote location. When not in use, two kickstands ease down from the cylinder between wheels, allowing Double to conserve power and wait for the next rider.

If you’re shocked that hardware this polished and sophisticated could be created on a typical Y Combinator budget of $20,00-40,000, join the club. But while the company has not received any other funding, and the Y Combinator money has helped, co-founder Marc DeVidts told me that there’s been other sources of income.

“We’ve been working for about a year,” DeVidts said. “DoubleRobotics was bootstrapped from the beginning by building custom robots for Fortune 500 companies.”

The Double will be built in the USA: assembled in Miami, with components fabricated all over the U.S. in various factories. The cost is $2,500, but it can be pre-ordered for $2,000 today.

Image credit: DoubleRobotics

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Instead of five, worn-out, hole-ridden paper cards or a slew of keychain swipe cards, FiveStar provides consumers with one single card that can be used to earn rewards from a wide range of local businesses, from yogurt shops to yoga studios.

The system operates similarly to grocery store member cards that are swiped at the checkout counter. It is used at the point-of-sale, which means neither offline merchants nor customers need to change their shopping behavior. Customers can earn discounts right there or points that will pay off in the future.

Since launching in 2011, FiveStars has recruited over 400,000 customers across the country, who have purchased 3.5 million items collectively. The company participated in Y Combinator in 2011 and has since raised a total of $16 million in investment. This round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM.

Stripe makes it remarkably easy to accept credit cards online. In just a few minutes, businesses can fully integrate a checkout system on their site or mobile app and start receiving payments. While many other powerful players are in the online payment field, most are geared toward financial institutions or 1-to-1 transactions. Stripe, in contrast to PayPal, Dwolla, VenMo (and so on), is a developer tool.

Stripe already has an impressive portfolio with thousands of users, including Foursquare, Parse, MoMA, and Shopify.

“There isn’t a real alternative to Stripe,” said Shopify founder Tobias Lutke. “They cracked the code on how Internet payments ought to be done.”

The technological innovation and powerful customer appeal attracted a valuation in the realm of half a billion dollars, as well as the créme de la créme of venture capital. Since its debut in 2010, Stripe has raised a total of $40 million with backing from Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Elon Musk, General Catalyst, and Redpoint. It also received money from Y Combinator two years ago, although did not participate in the program.

The 28-person team is headquartered in San Francisco. With promises from founder Patrick Collison of more to come, this is a company to keep an eye on.